


If You Pardon, We Will Mend

by glittercracker



Category: No. 6 - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-16 07:08:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15431679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittercracker/pseuds/glittercracker
Summary: It's been four years since Nezumi walked away from Shion. High time for a reunion!





	If You Pardon, We Will Mend

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote wrote this fic for the No. 6 zine, "Reunion Will Come." Please check out the zine if you haven't already, it's full of great fics, art & cosplays! The link to the FREE pdf: https://no6zine.tumblr.com/post/175251233170/the-no-6-zine-is-here-download-link-this-link
> 
> A print version of the zine is also in the works, we're taking pre-orders and it will be shipping mid-late August.
> 
> Thanks to my wonderful, patient betas, akumeoi and knightofsixthmagnitudeofstars
> 
> And there aren't enough thanks to honor ahiku for her beautiful illustration, which you can find here: https://78.media.tumblr.com/5a50ee28f5bc20c6accffea05e0c3912/tumblr_pch4vaVFBk1t58g44o1_1280.jpg

The sun hung heavy in the yellow sky. Two years in No. 4 and Nezumi still hadn’t gotten used to the relentless heat and humidity. In some ways, it was welcome: there were no bitter winters like those in West Block. No cutting wind on the streets to tear through his thin t-shirt and worn jacket, no shivering nights when he hadn’t earned enough money for stove fuel and he wondered if he would wake in the morning or freeze to death first.

 

Nezumi was relatively affluent, at least by the terms of the quarter of the city he inhabited. He even had money to save. Still, there were times when he longed for cold nights under a worn blanket, the glow of a banked stove parsing the darkness, and the warm, breathing body next to him, belonging to a friend who expected nothing from their shared bed. Who expected nothing at all from him, except to find him still there when he opened his eyes in the morning.

 

Today was one of those days, and no wonder, really. Exactly four years ago, he’d kissed Shion on a cold springtime hillside and promised him a reunion. And four years weren’t an insignificant amount of time in their shared history…

 

 _Enough!_ he told himself for the hundredth time that day, and stopped walking. He’d reached his favorite part of No. 4’s central park. Ancient trees formed a cool canopy over stone ruins dripping thick vegetation. Moss and vines softened them into a hazy topiary. This tropical forest was very different from the one he half-remembered from his early childhood, but its wildness and voracity felt similar. If there was anywhere he might escape his thoughts, it was here.

 

He’d brought along his script for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” although he mostly knew his part already. He had played Puck before, in other theaters, in other cities. He didn’t much like Shakespeare’s comedies, but he loved Puck as a character – the feral child of the forest, driving the absurd action and laughing as everyone around him succumbed to it. Thankfully, they hadn’t cast him as Titania. Dresses were one thing, but he drew the line at fairy wings.

 

He chose his favorite spot, a vine-covered pillar protruding from the forest floor, leafy enough to lean against comfortably. He opened the script and began reading through it. Most of the lines came back to him easily, and with the close heat and the sound of birds and humming insects, he was soon losing focus.

 

Drowsily, he skipped to Puck’s final monologue. It was one of his favorites, although he didn’t like to admit it, because he couldn’t excuse himself the frivolity of it. But it was poetry at its best, and since there was nobody to hear him, he spoke the words aloud:

 

“If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended…”

 

The words sank into the soft, heavy air, fell away as if he hadn’t spoken at all. They rang in his mind nonetheless. _All is mended._ Could words mend so easily? Some things, maybe. But there were transgressions that nothing could mend: or so he’d come to believe. _Is that why you haven’t come back?_ asked the gentle voice that lurked at the back of his mind. _You think I wouldn’t forgive you?_

_Stop!_ he told himself. Yes, this was the day he should have returned to Shion, begged his forgiveness, but he’d let time slip away. Maybe willed it away.

 

He shut his eyes and spoke the words of the monologue in his mind, trying to fill it with anything but his empty promise:

_Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue, We will make amends ere long…_

 

His mind did fill: with the image of a scarlet snake circling a lithe, white body. He put the script aside. This was hopeless. Nezumi folded the shawl that he still wore, despite the climate, and tucked it behind his head. It was too hot, and he had slept fitfully all week, never letting himself think about why. Well, he was thinking about it now, fruitless as it was. So he gave up and let himself.

 

*

 

He awakened to fractured moonlight playing over his face as it drifted through the trembling leaves overhead. The smell of green growing things and night-blooming flowers was heady. He was appalled with himself for falling asleep for so long. It wasn’t going to be easy to navigate the woods in the dark. He was about to reach for his shawl and script, but then he froze. He wasn’t alone.

 

The breeze had died for a moment, leaving something in its wake: the sound of someone breathing in the slow, steady cadence of sleep. It was a sound he had known well, once. Now it was both foreign and familiar as the contours of his own heart. For a long moment Nezumi simply listened, not daring to look. Hardly daring to hope. Then, slowly, he turned his head.

 

His first thought was that this couldn’t be real: Shion, sleeping between the roots of an ancient tree. He wore a long, silvery gown that spread out around him like mist. His hair fell in soft, snowy waves over his shoulders. A crown of wildflowers dripped colorful petals into his hair. Little lights hovered around him – fireflies?

 

Nezumi approached carefully until he was gazing down at him. Shion’s face was leaner, more pointed – less human? – but that innate sweetness still shaped his expression. Abandoned to sleep, one delicate hand curled against his cheek, lips full and rosy and slightly parted, he was so very beautiful. Perfect. _Too_ perfect?

 

The wind moved a tendril of thistledown hair across Shion’s eyes, and he murmured, a crease forming in his forehead. Before he could reconsider, Nezumi was reaching to brush the hair away. It was as fine and silky as he remembered, and he found himself stroking his fingers through it: a touch hardly more forceful than the breeze. It was enough, though, to make Shion’s eyelids flutter open.

 

The eyes that met Nezumi’s were a warm, dusky violet, and showed no surprise, just a shade of a smile. “How now, fair Puck?” His voice was more musical than Nezumi remembered.

 

“What…are you talking about?” Nezumi asked. “How are you here? And why are you dressed like that?”

 

“Where else would I be?” Shion asked, his smile turning puzzled. “And how else would I dress? I am Titania, queen of this forest.”

 

“Shion, I…” What? What could he say? Had Shion lost his mind? If he had, it could only be Nezumi’s doing. _Shit._

 

Shion smiled at him gently, sat up, and reached out to cup his cheek. Opposite longings crashed inside of Nezumi at the touch: to run from it, and to lean further into it. He did neither, only stared at Shion, paralyzed.

 

“Methinks your mind is addled by sleep,” Shion said, shaking his head. Petals drifted from his crown, but instead of falling, they took wing like butterflies, fluttered around the hovering lights. “You have nothing to be sorry for, sweet, so long as you keep your promise.” His long fingers trailed down Nezumi’s cheek, traced his lips.

 

“My promise? Reunion?”

 

Once again, Shion looked puzzled. “Reunion, when there has been no union? Guess again, if you would still have me as yours.”

 

“Have you…as mine?” Nezumi stammered. What _was_ this?

 

Shion’s coy smile turned to a pout, and damn, his lips were almost more than Nezumi could resist. “Forgotten so soon, my wanton Puck? Very well, perhaps this will serve to remind you.” Shion leaned forward, closing the space between them, and kissed him.

 

For a moment Nezumi panicked, tried to pull away. But the truth was, he had hungered for this, because Shion had given him both his first kiss and his last. Not his actual first, of course, but the first that had mattered; and though he’d had his share of lovers since leaving No. 6, he hadn’t kissed any of them. The very thought of it had sickened him, and now he knew why. It would have been a desecration, a betrayal, because deep down he had known that this moment would come, and that it would be exactly this gut-wrenchingly perfect.

 

Just as he gave in and opened to him though, Shion broke away. “What’s wrong?” Nezumi asked, trying to hide his disappointment.

 

Shion quirked an eyebrow. “If you do not know, then I cannot stay.” He stood, backed away, the silver gown rippling around him like water, petals from his crown drifting on the rising breeze. The hovering lights followed him. Alarm clutched at Nezumi’s throat as he realized that Shion truly meant to leave. He couldn’t face that loneliness again, having felt the alternative.

 

His heart was stuttering; there were tears in his eyes. “Please don’t go! What can I do to make you stay?”

 

Shion smiled at him sadly. “That, my wanderer, is for _you_ to answer.”

 

Nezumi stood up and reached for Shion, but he was growing indistinct. Nezumi grasped at a drift of gown, but his hand closed on nothing. Shion was gone, as if he’d never been.

 

“ _Shiiiooon!”_ he wailed, but there was no answer, only the wind in the trees. He tried to scream for him again, but all that emerged was a choked sob.

 

*

 

Nezumi started awake to hazy afternoon light, his heart pounding, tears on his cheeks and his shawl wet where his head had rested on it. _A dream?_ It had been a damned _dream?_ He laughed bitterly at himself. Of course. What else could it possibly have been?

 

He scrubbed the tears away angrily, grabbed his script and then froze, every nerve firing with his old survival instinct. Something was rustling in the undergrowth nearby, something big. He was reaching for the knife in his boot when it emerged from the trees. All Nezumi could do then was gape. _Had_ he been dreaming? Was he still?

 

No. The sticky dampness on his face, the prickle of grass beneath his hands, the tickle of leaves behind him were all too annoying to be anything but real, which meant that the man standing before him was real, too. A man in jeans and hiking boots and a familiar white button-down rather than a drift of gossamer fabric. He shouldered a large red backpack and held a rolled map. His clothes were dusty, his face exhausted, but his violet eyes were soft and wide and exactly as beautiful as Nezumi remembered. Nezumi couldn’t help wondering how he measured up against Shion’s memory of him.

 

“Shion?” he said.

 

“Nezumi? Why were you calling me? How did you know I was here?”

 

“I didn’t…” He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Why _are_ you here?”

 

Shion shrugged. “When you left, you said ‘reunion will come.’ But you never said when, or where, or how. It’s been four years, just like the first time, and so it seemed like the _right_ time.”

 

“But how did you know where to find me?” Nezumi asked, his mind and heart a tangle of conflicting emotions.

 

Shion smiled. “I’ve always known where you were.”

_Okay…_ Still, Shion had shown remarkable and very un-Shion-like restraint in not coming after him sooner. “Why did you wait this long?” Nezumi asked.

 

Shion considered this, looking off into the shadows of the woods. At last he said, “I guess I wanted to give you time to think about your promise.”

 

Shion’s voice merged with Titania’s from the dream, and abruptly, the tangle in Nezumi’s head cleared.

 

“Put those things down,” Nezumi said. Shion blinked at him, questions swarming in his eyes, but he laid down the map and unslung the pack. “Sit with me,” he said, offering Shion a hand. After a moment’s hesitation Shion took it, and sat down beside him. Shion’s hand was damp, and calloused, and so very warm. _Living people are warm._ Nezumi smiled a little, thinking of how Shion had been the one to teach him that.

 

“I promised you reunion,” Nezumi said slowly. “But that isn’t the whole answer, is it?”

 

“Answer?” Shion asked, brow furrowing in another echo of the dream.

 

Nezumi sighed. “You say you wanted to give me time to think about my promise,” he said. “But what did it mean to you?”

 

Shion gazed at him, bemused. “That someday I’d see you again.”

 

“And now that you’ve seen me, is it fulfilled?”

 

“…I guess it is,” he said tremulously, eyes wide and filling with pain.

 

Of course he would say that, and try to hide how much it hurt him to do so. Partly because he was Shion, but also because reunion was in fact all that Nezumi had promised him. A moment. Such a bleak and bitter promise.

 

He drew a deep breath, tightened his fingers around Shion’s. “Can I make you a new promise?” he asked.

 

Shion cocked his head. “What is it?”

 

“Everything after.”

 

“After…?”

 

“Reunion. That’s happened. But I want to see what happens next…if you do?”

 

Because Shion was still watching him in disbelief, Nezumi took his face gently between his palms, and touched his lips to Shion’s. For a moment there was no response; and then Shion was winding his fingers into Nezumi’s hair and kissing him back, with all the pent-up hunger of four long, lonely years. Nezumi’s body melted into Shion’s, and he kissed him as he’d always longed to kiss him.

 

When they finally parted, still clinging to each other, Nezumi asked, “Well, your Majesty? Does this mean you accept?”

 

“I don’t know,” Shion mused. “Does this mean no more good-bye kisses?”

 

“Never again,” Nezumi answered.

 

“Then yes,” Shion said, “I accept.” And they toppled, laughing, into the grass.


End file.
